Andy Cush

The Guardian posted a 14-minute video preview of an upcoming interview with Edward Snowden today, and among talk of the Russians (not working for them), Gitmo (could "live with" going), and 1984 (hasn't read it in a while) was this unsettling bit about NSA workers and nude photos.

NSA whistleblower talks exclusively to the Guardian about whether he is a Russian spy, his likely…
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You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22. They've suddenly thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now have access to all of your private records. Now, in the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example: an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation, but they're extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair, and they show their coworker. And their coworker says, "Oh, hey, that's great. Send that to Bill down the way. And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom, and sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It's never reported. Nobody ever knows about it, because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak.

When Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger asks Snowden to clarify how often he saw this sort of thing happen, he answered: "It's routine enough. Depending on sort of the company you keep, it could be more or less frequent. But these are seen as sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions."

There you have it: all your worst fears about government surveillance appear to be true! Never sext again.